And is the rebuild successful? Have you already done this with a "new installation"? Are other packages installed?
I recently decided to upgrade my Lazarus installation. I downloaded and installed version 3.6 over my existing installation.
What exactly does "over my existing installation" mean? You should always install
Lazarus in a new folder (or
delete all the old folder first). Several versions of the IDE can work in parallel, and even be launched simultaneously. You can
read more about it on the wiki. Or use
fpcupdeluxe. On
Windows, you can simply uncheck the "
Secondary installation" checkbox during installation.
If you installed directly into the same folder without deleting the old version, then this is wrong. In such cases, even the "clean build" that @wp mentioned may not help.
I am minded to go back to that version and I did zip up everthing from the Lazarus folder including all sub directories. Do you know if it will be ok to uninstall this latest version and the just unzip the earier one?
If you really did a full backup of the old version, then yes, just unzip it back (and yes, delete/rename the current folder first so there are no files from the new version left).
But it's safer to install the new one first, and when it works, you can definitely delete the old one.
If you rebuild lazarus, find the lazarus / lazarus.exe executable and check its date, then run that (without using startlazarus). If that works, then there is an old lazarus some where else
Good question, are you running via
lazarus.exe or
startlazarus.exe? The latter is needed to automatically launch the correct version. But if this does not work, then try manually finding the new rebuilt version of "
lazarus.exe", as @Martin_fr described.